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Refund fraud groups are exploiting lenient refund policies, resulting in significant losses for retailers like Amazon and prompting civil lawsuits and arrests. The scheme has become so pervasive that groups now market their services on Reddit, TikTok and Telegram. CNBC reports: Fraud groups are taking advantage of retailers' lenient return policies, experts told CNBC, which often include unlimited free returns and sometimes even a preference that customers keep the items. It's ballooned into a massive problem for retailers, costing them more than $101 billion last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail. The figure includes multiple forms of fraud, such as sending back clothing after it's been worn, known as "wardrobing," and returning shoplifted merchandise, the survey said. In December, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Page and 47 other people across the globe with alleged ties to Rekk, accusing them of conspiring to steal millions of dollars worth of products in a refund fraud operation. Amazon described these services as "illegitimate 'businesses'" that look to "exploit the refund process for their own financial gain to the detriment of honest consumers and retailers who must bear the brunt of increased costs, decreased inventory, and service disruption that impacts genuine customers." An Amazon spokesperson said the company is addressing the issue "head on" through specialized teams and machine learning tools that detect and prevent refund fraud. Here's how it works: A shopper buys a product online and sends the order information to a group such as Rekk, which then poses as the customer in requesting a refund. Amazon refunds the money to the customer, who then pays the fraud group usually between 15% and 30% of the refund amount, often via PayPal or with bitcoin. That means the customer ends up buying the product for what amounts to a huge discount. The fraud group then pays the conspiring employee at the retailer, typically a certain amount for a batch of packages the employee scans as returned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New emails from before the launch of the Epic Games Store in 2018 show just how angry Epic CEO Tim Sweeney was with the "assholes" at companies like Valve and Apple for squeezing "the little guy" with what he saw as inflated fees. "The emails, which came out this week as part of Wolfire's price-fixing case against Valve (as noticed by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter), confront Valve managers directly for platform fees Sweeney says are 'no longer justifiable,'" writes Ars Technica's Kyle Orland. "They also offer a behind-the-scenes look at the fury Sweeney and Epic would unleash against Apple in court proceedings starting years later. From the report: The first mostly unredacted email chain from the court documents, from August 2017 (PDF), starts with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell asking Sweeney if there is "anything we [are] doing to annoy you?" That query was likely prompted by Sweeney's public tweets at the time questioning "why Steam is still taking 30% of gross [when] MasterCard and Visa charge 2-5% per transaction, and CDN bandwidth is around $0.002/GB." Later in the same thread, he laments that "the internet was supposed to obsolete the rent-seeking software distribution middlemen, but here's Facebook, Google, Apple, Valve, etc." Expanding on these public thoughts in a private response to Newell, Sweeney allows that there was "a good case" for Steam's 30 percent platform fee "in the early days." But he also argues that the fee is too high now that Steam's sheer scale has driven down operating costs and made it harder for individual games to get as much marketing or user acquisition value from simply being available on the storefront. Sweeney goes on to spitball some numbers showing how Valve's fees are contributing to the squeeze all but the biggest PC game developers were feeling on their revenues: "If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1,000 than the developer themselves made. These guys are our engine customers and we talk to them all the time. Valve takes 30% for distribution; they have to spend 30% on Facebook/Google/Twitter [user acquisition] or traditional marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. So, the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990's." Based on experience with Fortnite and Paragon, Sweeney estimates that the true cost of distribution for PC games that sell for $25 or more in Western markets "is under 7% of gross." That's only slightly lower than the 12 percent take Epic would establish for its own Epic Games Store the next year. The second email chain (PDF) revealed in the lawsuit started in November 2018, with Sweeney offering Valve a heads-up on the impending launch of the Epic Games Store that would come just weeks later. While that move was focused on PC and Mac games, Sweeney quickly pivots to a discussion of Apple's total control over iOS, the subject at the time of a lawsuit whose technicalities were being considered by the Supreme Court. Years before Epic would bring its own case against Apple, Sweeney was somewhat prescient, noting that "Apple also has the resources to litigate and delay any change [to its total App Store control] for years... What we need right now is enough developer, press, and platform momentum to steer Apple towards fully opening up iOS sooner rather than later." To that end, Sweeney attempted to convince Valve that lowering its own platform fees would hurt Apple's position and thereby contribute to the greater good: "A timely move by Valve to improve Steam economics for all developers would make a great difference in all of this, clearly demonstrating that store competition leads to better rates for all developers. Epic would gladly speak in support of such a move anytime!" In a follow-up email on December 3, just days before the Epic Games Store launch, Sweeney took Valve to task more directly for its policy of offering lower platform fees for the largest developers on Steam. He offered some harsh words for Valve while once again begging the company to serve as a positive example in the developing case against Apple: "Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people. We're all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?" After being forwarded the message by Valve's Erik Johnson, Valve COO Scott Lynch simply offered up a sardonic "You mad bro?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When Nintendo sued the developers of Yuzu out of existence on March 4th, it wasn't just an attack on the leading way to play Nintendo Switch games without a Switch. It was a warning to anyone building a video game emulator. Seven developers have now stepped away from projects, are shutting them down, or have left the emulation scene entirely. Of those that remain, many are circling the wagons, getting quieter and more careful, trying not to paint targets on their backs. Four developers declined to talk to The Verge, telling me they didn't want to draw attention. One even tried to delete answers to my questions after we'd begun, suddenly scared of attracting press. Not everyone is so afraid. Four other emulator teams tell me they're optimistic Nintendo won't challenge them, that they're on strong legal footing, and that Yuzu may have been an unusually incriminating case. One decade-long veteran tells me everyone's just a bit more worried. But when I point out that Nintendo didn't have to prove a thing in court, they all admit they don't have money for lawyers. They say they'd probably be forced to roll over, like Yuzu, if the Japanese gaming giant came knocking. "I would do what I'd have to do," the most confident of the four tells me. "I would want to fight it... but at the same time, I know we exist because we don't antagonize Nintendo." There's a new meme where Yuzu is the mythical Hydra: cut off one head, and two more take its place. It's partly true in how multiple forks of Yuzu (and 3DS emulator Citra) sprung up shortly after their predecessors died: Suyu, Sudachi, Lemonade, and Lime are a few of the public names. But they're not giving Nintendo the middle finger: they're treating Nintendo's lawsuit like a guidebook about how not to piss off the company. In its legal complaint, Nintendo claimed Yuzu was "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale," giving users "detailed instructions" on how to "get it running with unlawful copies of Nintendo Switch games," among other things. Okay, no more guides, say the Switch emulator developers who spoke to me. They also say they're stripping out some parts of Yuzu that made it easier to play pirated games. As Ars Technica reported, a forked version called Suyu will require you to bring the firmware, title.keys, and prod.keys from your Switch before you can decrypt and play Nintendo games. Only one of those was technically required before. (Never mind that most people don't have an easily hackable first-gen Switch and would likely download these things off the net.) The developer of another fork tells me he plans to do something similar, making users "fend for yourself" by making sure the code doesn't auto-generate any keys. Most developers I spoke to are also trying to make it clear they aren't profiting at Nintendo's expense. One who initially locked early access builds behind a donation page has stopped doing that, making them publicly available on GitHub instead. The leader of another project tells me nothing will ever be paywalled, and for now, there's "strictly no donation," either. When I ask about the Dolphin Emulator, which faced a minor challenge from Nintendo last year, I'm told it publicly exposes its tiny nonprofit budget for anyone to scrutinize. But I don't know that these steps are enough to prevent Nintendo from throwing around its weight again, particularly when it comes to emulating the Nintendo Switch, its primary moneymaker. Since Yuzu's shut down, a slew of other emulators left the scene. The include (as highlighted by The Verge): - The Citra emulator for Nintendo 3DS is gone- The Pizza Boy emulators for Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color are gone- The Drastic emulator for Nintendo DS is free for now and will be removed- The lead developer of Yuzu and Citra has stepped away from emulation- The lead developer of Strato, a Switch emulator, has stepped away from emulation- Dynarmic, used to speed up various emulators including Yuzu, has abruptly ended development- One contributor on Ryujinx, a Switch emulator, has stepped away from the project- AetherSX2, a PS2 emulator, is finally gone (mostly unrelated; development was suspended a year ago)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two of the biggest manufacturers of locks used in commercial safes have been accused of essentially putting backdoors in at least some of their products in a new letter by Senator Ron Wyden. 404 Media: Wyden is urging the U.S. government to explicitly warn the public about the vulnerabilities, which Wyden says could be exploited by foreign adversaries to steal what U.S. businesses store in safes, such as trade secrets. The little known "manufacturer" or "manager" reset codes could let third parties -- such as spies or criminals -- bypass locks without the owner's consent and are sometimes not disclosed to customers. Wyden's office also found that while the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) bans such locks for sensitive and classified U.S. government use in part due to the security vulnerability reset codes pose, the government has deliberately not warned the public about the existence of these backdoors. The specific companies named in Wyden's letter are China-based SECURAM and U.S.-based Sargent and Greenleaf (S&G). Each produces keypad locks which are then implemented into safes by other manufacturers. The full list of locks that contain backdoor codes is unknown, but documentation available online points to multiple SECURAM products which do include them, and S&G confirmed to Wyden's office that some of its own locks also have similar codes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The head of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says investigators still do not know who worked on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 door plug involved in a Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines midair emergency and that video footage was overwritten. From a report: NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in a letter to senators that investigators sought security camera footage when the door plug was opened and closed in September but were informed the material was overwritten. "The absence of those records will complicate the NTSB's investigation moving forward," Homendy said. "To date, we still do not know who performed the work to open, reinstall, and close the door plug on the accident aircraft." The NTSB said previously four key bolts were missing from the door plug that blew out on the plane. Last week, Homendy said she spoke to Boeing CEO David Calhoun "and asked for the names of the people who performed the work. He stated he was unable to provide that information and maintained that Boeing has no records of the work being performed." Boeing said it "will continue supporting this investigation in the transparent and proactive fashion we have supported all regulatory inquiries into this accident. We have worked hard to honor the rules about the release of investigative information." A Boeing official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the planemaker standard practice is to overwrite security videos after 30 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France Travail, the government agency responsible for assisting the unemployed, has fallen victim to a massive data breach exposing the personal information of up to 43 million French citizens dating back two decades, the department announced on Wednesday. The incident, which has been reported to the country's data protection watchdog (CNIL), is the latest in a series of high-profile cyber attacks targeting French government institutions and underscores the growing threat to citizens' private data. From a report: The department's statement reveals that names, dates of birth, social security numbers, France Travail identifiers, email addresses, postal addresses, and phone numbers were exposed. Passwords and banking details aren't affected, at least. That said, CNIL warned that the data stolen during this incident could be linked to stolen data in other breaches and used to build larger banks of information on any given individual. It's not clear whether the database's entire contents were stolen by attackers, but the announcement suggests that at least some of the data was extracted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has eliminated egress fees for customers removing data from its Azure cloud, joining Amazon Web Services and Google in this move. The decision comes as the European Data Act's provisions targeting lock-in terms are set to take effect in 2025. Microsoft adds: Azure already offers the first 100GB/month of egressed data for free to all customers in all Azure regions around the world. If you need to egress more than 100GB/month, please follow these steps to claim your credit. Contact Azure Support for details on how to start the data transfer-out process. Please comply with the instructions to be eligible for the credit. Azure Support will apply the credit when the data transfer process is complete and all Azure subscriptions associated to the account have been canceled. The exemption on data transfer out to the internet fees also aligns with the European Data Act and is accessible to all Azure customers globally and from any Azure region.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: Tech-backed nonprofit Code.org on Wednesday fired the latest salvo in its legal battle over $3 million in unpaid licensing fees for the use of Code.org's free [for non-commercial purposes] K-12 computer science curriculum by WhiteHat Jr., the learn-to-code edtech company with a controversial past that was bought for $300M in 2020 by Byju's, another edtech firm that received a $50M investment from Mark Zuckerberg's venture firm that still touts its ties to Zuckerberg on its Investors page. In a filing in support of a motion for default judgement, Code.org founder and CEO Hadi Partovi wrote: "Whitehat's continued use of Code.org's platform and content without payment following Code.org's termination of the Agreement has caused, and is continuing to cause, irreparable injury to Code.org, because it undermines Code.org's charitable and nonprofit purpose of expanding access to computer science in schools and increasing participation by young women and students from other underrepresented groups and because it jeopardizes Code.org's status as an organization described in Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. As a Section 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization, Code.org may not use its assets to benefit for-profit entities without receiving fair compensation." According to the [proposed] default judgement, "Code.org is awarded the principal amount sued for of $3,000,000, along with attorneys' fees, costs, and expenses in an amount to be determined following Code.org's submission of an application, together with pre-judgment interest of $216,001.16, from May 26, 2023 to March 13, 2024, and any additional pre-judgment interest that may accrue until the date of judgment, calculated at the rate of 9% per annum pursuant to CPLR 5001 and 5004, plus any post-judgment interest at the statutory rate, for a total judgment in the amount of $[TBD]."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is telling workers to close their eyes and dream of being somewhere else while they're standing in a warehouse. From a report: A worker in one of Amazon's fulfillment centers, who we've granted anonymity, sent 404 Media a photo they took of a screen imploring them to try "savoring" the idea of something that makes them happy -- as in, not being at work, surrounded by robots and packages. "Savoring," the screen says, in a black font over a green block of color. "Close your eyes and think about something that makes you happy." Under that text -- which I can't emphasize enough: it looks like something a 6th grader would make in Powerpoint -- there's a bunch of white space, and a stock illustration of a faceless person in an Amazon vest. He's being urged on by an anthropomorphic stack of Amazon packages with wheels and arms. There's also a countdown timer that says "repeat until timer ends." In the image we saw, it said 10 seconds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced a major change to its Safe Browsing feature in Chrome today that will make the service work in real time by checking against a server-side list -- all without sharing your browsing habits with Google. From a report: Previously, Chrome downloaded a list of known sites that harbor malware, unwanted software and phishing scams once or twice per hour. Now, Chrome will move to a system that will send the URLs you are visiting to its servers and check against a rapidly updated list there. The advantage of this is that it doesn't take up to an hour to get an updated list because, as Google notes, the average malicious site doesn't exist for more than 10 minutes. The company claims that this new server-side system can catch up to 25 percent more phishing attacks than using local lists. These local lists have also grown in size, putting more of a strain on low-end machines and low-bandwidth connections. Google is rolling out this new system to desktop and iOS users now, with Android support coming later this month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Damage to at least three subsea cables off the west coast of Africa is disrupting internet services across the continent. From a report: The West Africa Cable System, MainOne and ACE sea cables -- arteries for telecommunications data -- were all affected on Thursday, triggering outages and connectivity issues for mobile operators and internet service providers, according to data from internet analysis firms including NetBlocks, Kentik and Cloudflare. The cause of the cable faults has not yet been determined. Data show a major disruption to connectivity in eight West African countries, with Ivory Coast, Liberia and Benin being the most affected, NetBlocks, an internet watchdog, said in a post on X. Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon are among other countries impacted. Several companies have also reported service disruptions in South Africa. "This is a devastating blow to internet connectivity along the west coast of Africa, which will be operating in a degraded state for weeks to come," said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis firm Kentik. The cable faults off the Ivory Coast come less than a month after three telecommunications cables were severed in the Red Sea, highlighting the vulnerability of critical communications infrastructure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Outdoor Voices, an athletic apparel company, is closing all its stores on Sunday, The New York Times reported this week, citing four employees at four different stores. From the report: In an internal Slack message reviewed by The New York Times, some employees were notified on Wednesday that "Outdoor Voices is embarking on a new chapter as we transition to an exclusively online business." Products in stores are going to be discounted 50 percent, according to the Slack message. The news came as a surprise, two of the employees said, adding that they were not offered severance. Outdoor Voices, which lists 16 retail locations on its website, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Founded in 2014 by Ty Haney, the brand became popular for its muted tones and highly Instagrammable aesthetics. Think matching crop tops and leggings in pale shades of earthy tones. Its hashtag and company mantra, #DoingThings, became popular on social media, where brand loyalists would regularly share images of themselves participating in athletic activities like running or hiking or spinning. The company often hosted events, like group exercise classes, and even built an editorial platform called The Recreationalist. Many Outdoor Voices customers weren't just shoppers; they were devotees. The company was a chic athleisure brand perfectly positioned to attract millennials, but it was also selling a lifestyle. A lifestyle that helped the brand raise millions in funding.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A judge in the UK High Court has declared that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, marking the end of a years-long debate. From a report: "The evidence is overwhelming," said Honourable Mr. Justice James Mellor, delivering a surprise ruling at the close of the trial. "Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper. Dr. Wright is not the person that operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Dr. Wright is not the person that created the Bitcoin system. Nor is Dr. Wright the author of the Bitcoin software," he said. The ruling brings to a close a six-week trial, in which the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a nonprofit consortium of crypto companies, asked the court to declare that Wright is not Satoshi on the basis that he had allegedly fabricated his evidence and contorted his story repeatedly as new inconsistencies came to light. "After all the evidence in this remarkable trial, it is clear beyond doubt that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto," claimed Jonathan Hough, legal counsel for COPA, as he began his closing submissions on Tuesday. "Wright has lied, and lied, and lied."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beijing has hit out at US legislation to ban TikTok as former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said he was assembling a consortium to buy the app from its Chinese owner. From a report: Foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Thursday that the US had shown a "robber's logic" towards the app (non-paywalled link), which has 170mn users in America. "When you see other people's good things, you must find ways to own them," Wang said. The US House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a bill that would force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the app to a non-Chinese company within six months or be banned from US app stores. It still needs Senate approval and President Joe Biden's signature. Mnuchin said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that he was putting together an investor group to attempt to take over the short-video app. "It's a great business," he said. "It should be owned by a US business. There's no way the Chinese would ever let a US company run something like this in China." He Yadong, spokesperson for the commerce ministry, on Thursday called on Washington to "stop unfairly suppressing foreign companies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The polio survivor known as "the man in the iron lung" has died at the age of 78. Paul Alexander contracted polio in 1952 when he was six, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. The disease left him unable to breathe independently, leading doctors to place him in the metal cylinder, where he would spend the rest of his life. He would go on to earn a law degree -- and practice law -- as well as publish a memoir. [...] In 1952, when he became ill, doctors in his hometown of Dallas operated on him, saving his life. But polio meant his body was no longer able to breathe on his own. The answer was to place him in a so-called iron lung - a metal cylinder enclosing his body up to his neck. The lung, which he called his "old iron horse," allowed him to breathe. Bellows sucked air out of the cylinder, forcing his lungs to expand and take in air. When the air was let back in, the same process in reverse made his lungs deflate. After years, Alexander eventually learned to breathe by himself so that he was able to leave the lung for short periods of time. Like most polio survivors placed in iron lungs, he was not expected to survive long. But he lived for decades, long after the invention of the polio vaccine in the 1950s all but eradicated the disease in the Western world. [...] Advances in medicine made iron lungs obsolete by the 1960s, replaced by ventilators. But Alexander kept living in the cylinder because, he said, he was used to it. He was recognized by Guinness World Records as the person who lived the longest in an iron lung.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At this year's SXSW festival, discussions on artificial intelligence's future sparked controversy during screenings of premiers like "The Fall Guy" and "Immaculate." Variety reports: The quick-turnaround video editors at SXSW cut a daily sizzle reel highlighting previous panels, premieres and other events, which then runs before festival screenings. On Tuesday, the fourth edition of that daily video focused on the wide variety of keynotes and panelists in town to discuss AI. Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount -- many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI -- decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently. Those boos grew the loudest toward the end of the sizzle, when OpenAI's VP of consumer product and head of ChatGPT Peter Deng declares on camera, "I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human." That is not a popular opinion. Deng participated in the session "AI and Humanity's Co-evolution with Open AI's Head of Chat GPT" on Monday, moderated by Signal Fire's consumer VC and former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine. Constine is at the start of the video with another soundbite that drew jeers: "SXSW has always been the digital culture makers, and I think if you look out into this room, you can see that AI is a culture." [...] The groans also grew loud for Magic Leap's founder Rony Abovitz, who gave this advice during the "Storyworlds, Hour Blue & Amplifying Humanity Ethically with AI" panel: "Be one of those people who leverages AI, don't be run over by it." You can hear some of the reactions from festival attendees here, here, and here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FAA today awarded a launch license to SpaceX for Starship's third-ever test flight on March 14. "The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements," the agency wrote in a post on X this afternoon. Space.com reports: The megarocket has two test flights under its belt so far, which took place in April and November of last year. Starship's two stages failed to separate as planned on the April flight, however, which ended after just four minutes. Things went better in November -- stage separation occurred as planned, for example -- but both stages ended up exploding high in the sky on that mission as well. The FAA wrapped up its investigation into what happened on the November flight late last month. But the agency took some additional time before awarding a license for launch number three today. Thursday's flight will be different, and bolder, than its predecessors. "The third flight test aims to build on what we've learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship's payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage's coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship," SpaceX wrote in a mission description. In addition, Thursday's test launch will aim to bring Starship's upper stage down in the Indian Ocean. The target splashdown zone for the first two test missions, by contrast, was the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Underwater speakers that broadcast the hustle and bustle of thriving coral could bring life back to more damaged and degraded reefs that are in danger of becoming ocean graveyards, researchers say. Scientists working off the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean found that coral larvae were up to seven times more likely to settle at a struggling reef where they played recordings of the snaps, groans, grunts and scratches that form the symphony of a healthy ecosystem. "We're hoping this may be something we can combine with other efforts to put the good stuff back on the reef," said Nadeege Aoki at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "You could leave a speaker out for a certain amount of time and it could be attracting not just coral larvae but fish back to the reef." The world has lost half its coral reefs since the 1950s through the devastating impact of global heating, overfishing, pollution, habitat loss and outbreaks of disease. The hefty declines have fueled efforts to protect remaining reefs through approaches that range from replanting with nursery-raised corals to developing resilient strains that can withstand warming waters. Aoki and her colleagues took another tack, building on previous research which showed that coral larvae swim towards reef sounds. They set up underwater speakers at three reefs off St John, the smallest of the US Virgin Islands, and measured how many coral larvae, held in sealed containers of filtered sea water, settled on to pieces of rock-like ceramic in the containers up to 30 meters from the speakers. While the researchers installed speakers at all three sites, they only played sounds from a thriving reef at one: the degraded Salt Pond reef, which was bathed in the marine soundscape for three nights. The other two sites, the degraded Cocoloba and the healthier Tektite reefs were included for comparison. When coral larvae are released into the water column they are carried on the currents, and swim freely, before finding a spot to settle. Once they drop to the ocean floor, they become fixed to the spot and -- if they survive -- mature into adults. Writing in the Royal Society Open Science journal, the researchers describe how, on average, 1.7 times more coral larvae settled at the Salt Pond reef than at the other sites where no reef sounds were played. The settlement rates at Salt Pond dropped with distance from the speaker, suggesting the broadcasts were responsible. While the results are promising, Aoki said more work is afoot to understand whether other coral species respond to reef sounds in the same way, and whether the corals thrive after settling. "You have to be very thoughtful about the application of this technology," Aoki added. "You don't want to encourage them to settle where they will die. It really has to be a multi-pronged effort with steps in place to ensure the survival of these corals and their growth over time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader ahbond shares a report from VentureBeat: Today, Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called "Devin." While there are multiple coding assistants out there, including the famous Github Copilot, Devin is said to stand out from the crowd with its ability to handle entire development projects end-to-end, right from writing the code and fixing the bugs associated with it to final execution. This is the first offering of this kind and even capable of handling projects on Upwork, the startup has demonstrated. [...] In a blog post today on Cognition's website, Scott Wu, the founder and CEO of Cognition and an award-winning sports coder, explained Devin can access common developer tools, including its own shell, code editor and browser, within a sandboxed compute environment to plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devin's chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem. It then begins the project using its developer tools, just like how a human would use them, writing its own code, fixing issues, testing and reporting on its progress in real-time, allowing the user to keep an eye on everything as it works. [...] According to demos shared by Wu, Devin is capable of handling a range of tasks in its current form. This includes common engineering projects like deploying and improving apps/websites end-to-end and finding and fixing bugs in codebases to more complex things like setting up fine-tuning for a large language model using the link to a research repository on GitHub or learning how to use unfamiliar technologies. In one case, it learned from a blog post how to run the code to produce images with concealed messages. Meanwhile, in another, it handled an Upwork project to run a computer vision model by writing and debugging the code for it. In the SWE-bench test, which challenges AI assistants with GitHub issues from real-world open-source projects, the AI software engineer was able to correctly resolve 13.86% of the cases end-to-end -- without any assistance from humans. In comparison, Claude 2 could resolve just 4.80% while SWE-Llama-13b and GPT-4 could handle 3.97% and 1.74% of the issues, respectively. All these models even required assistance, where they were told which file had to be fixed. Currently, Devin is available only to a select few customers. Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance wrote a piece about his experience using it here. "The Doom of Man is at hand," captions Slashdot reader ahbond. "It will start with the low-hanging Jira tickets, and in a year or two, able to handle 99% of them. In the short term, software engineers may become like bot farmers, herding 10-1000 bots writing code, etc. Welcome to the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, the only known surviving copy of 32-bit OS/2 from Microsoft was purchased for $650. "Now, two of the internet's experts in getting early PC operating systems running today have managed to fire it up, and you can see the results," reports The Register. From the report: Why such interest in this nearly third-of-a-century old, unreleased OS? Because this is the way the PC industry very nearly went. This SDK came out in June 1990, just one month after Windows 3.0. If 32-bit OS/2 had launched as planned, Windows 3 would have been the last version before it was absorbed into OS/2 and disappeared. There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone, no fondleslabs. Twenty-first century computers would be unimaginably different. The surprise here is that we can see a glimpse of this world that never happened. The discovery of this pre-release OS shows how very nearly ready it was in 1990. IBM didn't release its solo version until April 1992, the same month as Windows 3.1 -- but now, we can see it was nearly ready two years earlier. That's why Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum called his look The Future That Never Was. He uncovered a couple of significant bugs, but more impressively, he found workarounds for both, and got both features working fine. OS/2 2 could run multiple DOS VMs at once, but in the preview, they wouldn't open -- due to use of an undocumented instruction which Intel did implement in the Pentium MMX and later processors. Secondly, the bundled network client wouldn't install -- but removing a single file got that working fine. That alone is a significant difference between Microsoft's OS/2 2.0 and IBM's version: Big Blue didn't include networking until Warp Connect 3 in 1995. His verdict: "The 6.78 build of OS/2 2.0 feels surprisingly stable and complete. The cover letter that came with the SDK stressed that Microsoft developers had been using the OS/2 pre-release for day-to-day work." Over at Virtually Fun, Neozeed also took an actual look at Microsoft OS/2 2.0, carefully recreating that screenshot from PC Magazine in May 1990. He even managed to get some Windows 2 programs running, although this preview release did not yet have a Windows subsystem. On his Internet Archive page, he has disk images and downloadable virtual machines so that you can run this yourself under VMware or 86Box.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study from the Institute for the Future of Work, contemporary technology often has a negative impact on workers' quality of life. The think tank surveyed over 6,000 people to learn how four categories of workplace technologies affected their wellbeing. TechSpot reports the findings: The study found that increased exposure to three of the categories tended to worsen workers' mental state and health. The three areas that negatively impact people most are wearable and remote sensing technologies, which covers CCTV cameras and wearable trackers; robotics, consisting of automated machines, self-driving vehicles, and other equipment; and, unsurprisingly, technologies relating to AI and ML, which includes everything from decision management to biometrics. Only one of the categories was found to be beneficial to employees, and it's one that has been around for decades: ICT tech such as laptops, tablets, phones, and real-time messaging tools.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: We are often told that setting the bar high is key to success. After all, if you shoot for the moon and miss, at least you'll land with the stars. But Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang wants privileged Gen Z grads to lower their expectations. "People with very high expectations have very low resilience -- and unfortunately, resilience matters in success," Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations." Indeed, as the billionaire boss pointed out, those at elite institutions like Stanford probably have higher expectations for their future than your average Joe. The university is one of the most selective in the United States -- it ranks third best in the country, according to the QS World University Rankings, and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with student debt, not even the best universities in the world can teach you resilience. "I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you," Huang added. [...] For those fortunate enough to never have personally experienced hardship growing up, Huang doesn't have any advice on how to welcome more of it into your life now. But he did have some advice on embracing tough times. "I don't know how to do it [but] for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering," Huang said. "Greatness comes from character and character isn't formed out of smart people -- it's formed out of people who suffered."It's why despite Nvidia's success -- the company has a $2 trillion market cap -- Huang would still welcome hardship at his organization."To this day I use the phrase 'pain and suffering' inside our company with great glee," he added. "I mean that in a happy way because you want to refine the character of your company." Essentially, if you want your workforce to always be on their A game, don't let them rest on their laurels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roman Sterlingov, the founder of a $400 million crypto-mixing service called Bitcoin Fog, has been convicted of money laundering in a United State District Court on Tuesday. Other charges include money laundering conspiracy, operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, and violations of the D.C. Money Transmitters Act. CoinTelegraph reports: Sterlingov, however, had argued throughout the trial that he was only a user of the service, and not its operator. His attorney, Tok Ekeland said in a March 12 X post that his team will appeal the verdict. According to evidence presented at the trial, Sterlingov operated Bitcoin Fog from October 2011 to April 2021, which acted as a money laundering service for "criminals seeking to hide their illicit proceeds from law enforcement." The service moved over 1.2 million Bitcoin over the decade-long operation -- worth $400 million at the time of the transactions -- with the bulk of cryptocurrency coming from darknet marketplaces tied to narcotics, computer fraud abuse and identity theft, the government said. Bitcoin Fog also served distributors of child sexual abuse material. Evidence used to convict Sterlingov found that the "vast majority" of crypto deposited to his crypto exchange accounts came from "Bitcoin clusters" associated with Bitcoin Fog. "Evidence presented at trial clearly showed that the defendant laundered hundreds of millions of illicit funds from the dark web through Bitcoin Fog in an attempt to conceal the origin of those funds," said Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Investigation Chief Jim Lee.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: Stanford University says the cybersecurity incident it dealt with last year was indeed ransomware, which it failed to spot for more than four months. Keen readers of El Reg may remember the story breaking toward the end of October 2023 after Akira posted Stanford to its shame site, with the university subsequently issuing a statement simply explaining that it was investigating an incident, avoiding the dreaded R word. Well, surprise, surprise, ransomware was involved, according to a data breach notice sent out to the 27,000 people affected by the attack. Akira targeted the university's Department of Public Safety (DPS) and this week's filing with the Office of the Maine Attorney General indicates that Stanford became aware of the incident on September 27, more than four months after the initial breach took place. According to Monday's filing, the data breach occurred on May 12 2023 but was only discovered on September 27 of last year, raising questions about whether the attacker(s) was inside the network the entire time and why it took so long to spot the intrusion. It's not fully clear what information was compromised, but the draft letters include placeholders for three different variables. However, the filing with Maine's AG suggests names and social security numbers are among the data types to have been stolen. All affected individuals have been offered 24 months of free credit monitoring, including access to a $1 million insurance reimbursement policy and ID theft recovery services. Akira's post dedicated to Stanford on its leak site claims it stole 430 GB worth of data, including personal information and confidential documents. It's all available to download via a torrent file and the fact it remains available for download suggests the research university didn't pay whatever ransom the attackers demanded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Wired article: The U.S. economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech -- a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new thing -- some people whose days as fresh-faced coders are long gone say that having decades of experience can feel like a disadvantage. Ageism is a longtime problem in the tech industry. Database startup RelevantDB went viral in 2021 after it posted a job listing bragging, "We hire old people," which played off industry stereotypes. In 2020, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that IBMhad engaged in age discrimination, pushing out older workers to make room for younger ones. (The company has denied engaging in "systemic age discrimination.") A recent LinkedIn ad that shows an older woman unfamiliar with tech jargon saying her son sells invisible clouds triggered a backlash from people who say it unfairly portrayed older people as out of touch. In response, Jim Habig, LinkedIn's vice president of marketing, says: "This ad didn't meet our goal to create experiences where all professionals feel welcomed and valued, and we are working to replace the spot." [...] Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 workers over the past two years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the industry. To older workers, the purge is both a reminder of the dotcom bust, and a new frontier. The industry's generally consistent growth in recent decades as the economy has become more tech-centric means that many more senior workers -- which in tech can sometimes be considered to mean over 35 but includes people in their late forties, fifties, or sixties -- may have less experience with job hunting. For decades, tech workers could easily hop between jobs in their networks, often poached by recruiters. And as tech companies boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic's early days, increased demand for skills gave workers leverage. Now the power has shifted to the employers as companies seek to become efficient and correct that over hiring phase, and applicants are hitting walls. Workers have to network, stay active on LinkedIn, join message boards, and stand out. With four generations now clocking in to work, things can feel crowded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to end affirmative action in college admissions, there has been increased scrutiny on legacy admissions -- the practice of giving special considerations to the relatives of alumni. Critics say this practice disproportionately benefits white students from wealthy backgrounds. Much of the discussion and research on legacy admissions focuses on Ivy League and other highly selective schools, but these colleges enroll only a small share of students. How widespread is the practice of legacy admissions? Is it common among public colleges? Brookings: In this report, we document the prevalence of legacy admissions, as reported by colleges, across higher education around the time of the SFFA decision. Legacy admissions were more often used at selective and private institutions, but a substantial minority of public and less selective institutions also considered legacy status in admissions. The use of legacy preferences appears to have been most common in the Northeast and South and least common in the West. There is substantial -- but incomplete -- overlap in the colleges that considered legacy status and those that practiced affirmative action (AA) prior to SFFA. A number of colleges, including some public colleges, said they considered relationships to alumni but not racial identity in admissions. While most state flagships don't consider legacy status in admissions, half have at least one scholarship opportunity that is catered to legacy students. Because the data are available with a lag, we do not know how many colleges have changed their legacy admissions policies in response to the Court's decision on affirmative action, but press reports and our conversations with admissions representatives indicate that some colleges have changed course in the past few years, including at least five state flagships. The effect of legacy preferences on who enrolls at a particular university may not be substantial overall. Many of the colleges that use legacy admissions are not that selective, and the scholarships for relatives of alumni are typically small. Still, even if the number of students directly displaced by legacies who had a leg up is ultimately not that large, the practice sends students the wrong signal about what's important and is contrary to the mission of a public university. In a recent survey, half of first-generation college students said they thought legacy admissions practices may have hurt their chances. Perceptions of an unfair admissions process might also make some students less likely to apply or undermine the perceived legitimacy of higher education, though we did not find research on this topic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For decades, U.S. inventors sent in models with their patent applications -- gizmos that reveal a secret history of unmet needs and relentless innovation. The New Yorker: The ruins of American invention have been recently resurrected in a former textile mill in Wilmington, Delaware. The Henry Clay Mill, now better known as Hagley Museum and Library Visitor Center, is perched on the banks of Brandywine Creek, at the southern edge of a sprawling estate once owned by the du Pont family; just upstream lies the oldest of the dynasty's several stately homes in the region, as well as the remains of the gunpowder works upon which its fortune was built. One morning, Chris Cascio, a curator, welcomed me into the mill, where the space once occupied by cotton-picking and carding machines now houses a curious exhibit: the scavenged remainders of a much larger, long-lost museum. From 1790 to 1880, Cascio explained, the U.S. Patent Office first encouraged and then required an inventor to submit a model along with each application. These models -- thousands of miniature devices, often exquisitely detailed -- were then exhibited in Washington, D.C., in the office's model gallery. Sometimes called the "Temple of Invention," the gallery was a bustling landmark: it regularly attracted up to ten thousand visitors a month and was ranked as "the greatest permanent attraction in the city," according to one newspaper. But by the late nineteenth century it had effectively shut its doors. Hagley's latest exhibit, "Nation of Inventors," is the largest permanent public display of patent models since that time. [...] The U.S. system was also unique in that no other country required a model to accompany a patent application. The reasons why soon became clear. As early as the eighteen-thirties, the collection had outgrown the Patent Office's cramped headquarters at the former Blodgett's Hotel. In 1836, a fire destroyed at least seven thousand models, but, rather than abandon the requirement, the Patent Office doubled down, securing congressional funding to reconstruct the models and laying the foundations for a truly monumental building, with a facade modelled after the Parthenon. The structure, which now houses the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, occupies an entire city block. In the engineer Pierre L'Enfant's master plan for the capital, it was intended to serve as a kind of nondenominational "church of the republic," between the White House on one side and the Capitol on the other.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Epic Games, which makes the popular video game "Fortnite," on Wednesday accused Apple of violating an injunction governing its lucrative App Store, and asked a U.S. judge to hold Apple in contempt and end its "sham" compliance. From a report: A September 2021 injunction by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, let developers provide links and buttons that direct consumers to other means to pay for digital content. In a filing with the California court, Epic alleged that Apple is in "blatant violation" of that injunction, despite the Cupertino, California-based company's assurance in a Jan. 16 court notice that it had "fully complied." Epic said Apple has imposed new rules and a new 27% fee on developers for some purchases, which taken together make the links "commercially unusable." The Cary, North Carolina-based developer also said Apple continues to "categorically prohibit" buttons, and still forbids some apps from telling users they have other purchasing options.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo will begin offering a robotaxi service to the public in Los Angeles this week and in Austin by the end of the year, the company's co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said Wednesday at SXSW. From a report: The Alphabet company has been testing and validating its driverless vehicles across about 43 square miles around downtown, Barton Hills, Riverside, East Austin and Hyde Park neighborhoods. The announcement comes about a week after Waymo started letting its autonomous vehicles traverse Austin without a safety operator behind the wheel, a critical step before the company opens the program up to the public. Opening up a robotaxi service means the public will be able to hail a ride in a driverless car via the Waymo One app. Importantly, Waymo will be able to charge for those rides. Austin will become the fourth city where Waymo operates a commercial driverless service. Waymo also operates a robotaxi service in Phoenix, San Francisco and soon Los Angeles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ethereum has successfully completed a major software upgrade that should make using the blockchain network ecosystem cheaper. The update enables transactions that previously cost $1 on linked Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum, Polygon, and Coinbase's Base to be executed for just a cent. The Dencun upgrade, a combination of the "Deneb" and "Cancun" portions of the update, introduces a new data storage system for Ethereum. Currently, most Layer 2 blockchains store data on Ethereum, and because this data is stored permanently on every Ethereum node, storage costs often account for around 90% of Layer 2 expenses. These costs are typically passed on to applications, which in turn charge consumers. With Dencun, Layer 2s can now store data in a new type of repository called blobs, which will be cheaper as the data will only be stored for approximately 18 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You'll soon get to try out OpenAI's buzzy text-to-video generator for yourself. From a report: In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati says Sora will be available "this year" and that it "could be a few months." OpenAI first showed off Sora, which is capable of generating hyperrealistic scenes based on a text prompt, in February. The company only made the tool available for visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to start, but that didn't stop some Sora-generated videos from making their way onto platforms like X. In addition to making the tool available to the public, Murati says OpenAI has plans to "eventually" incorporate audio, which has the potential to make the scenes even more realistic. The company also wants to allow users to edit the content in the videos Sora produces, as AI tools don't always create accurate images. "We're trying to figure out how to use this technology as a tool that people can edit and create with," Murati tells the Journal. When pressed on what data OpenAI used to train Sora, Murati didn't get too specific and seemed to dodge the question.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will Knight, writing for Wired: Goat Simulator 3 is a surreal video game in which players take domesticated ungulates on a series of implausible adventures, sometimes involving jetpacks. That might seem an unlikely venue for the next big leap in artificial intelligence, but Google DeepMind today revealed an AI program capable of learning how to complete tasks in a number of games, including Goat Simulator 3. Most impressively, when the program encounters a game for the first time, it can reliably perform tasks by adapting what it learned from playing other games. The program is called SIMA, for Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, and it builds upon recent AI advances that have seen large language models produce remarkably capable chabots like ChatGPT. [...] DeepMind's latest video game project hints at how AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini could soon do more than just chat and generate images or video, by taking control of computers and performing complex commands. "The paper is an interesting advance for embodied agents across multiple simulations," says Linxi "Jim" Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia who works on AI gameplay and was involved with an early effort to train AI to play by controlling a keyboard and mouse with a 2017 OpenAI project called World of Bits. Fan says the Google DeepMind work reminds him of this project as well as a 2022 effort called VPT that involved agents learning tool use in Minecraft. "SIMA takes one step further and shows stronger generalization to new games," he says. "The number of environments is still very small, but I think SIMA is on the right track." [...] For the SIMA project, the Google DeepMind team collaborated with several game studios to collect keyboard and mouse data from humans playing 10 different games with 3D environments, including No Man's Sky, Teardown, Hydroneer, and Satisfactory. DeepMind later added descriptive labels to that data to associate the clicks and taps with the actions users took, for example whether they were a goat looking for its jetpack or a human character digging for gold. The data trove from the human players was then fed into a language model of the kind that powers modern chatbots, which had picked up an ability to process language by digesting a huge database of text. SIMA could then carry out actions in response to typed commands. And finally, humans evaluated SIMA's efforts inside different games, generating data that was used to fine-tune its performance. Further reading: DeepMind's blog post.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rates of more than a dozen cancers are increasing among adults under 50 worldwide, with the number of early-onset cancer cases predicted to rise by around 30% between 2019 and 2030. Investigators are searching for explanations, considering factors such as obesity, early-cancer screening, gut microbiome, and tumor genomes. Despite increased screening and awareness, mortality from early-onset cancers has risen by nearly 28% between 1990 and 2019 globally.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Wednesday that would give TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance about six months to divest the U.S. assets of the short-video app used by about 170 million Americans or face a ban. From a report: The bill passed 352-65, with bipartisan support, but it faces a more uncertain path in the Senate where some favor a different approach to regulating foreign-owned apps that could pose security concerns. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not indicated how he plans to proceed. TikTok's fate has become a major issue in Washington. Democratic and Republican lawmakers said their offices had received large volumes of calls from teenaged TikTok users who oppose the legislation, with the volume of complaints at times exceeding the number of calls seeking a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The measure is also the latest in a series of moves in Washington to respond to U.S. national security concerns about China, from connected vehicles to advanced artificial intelligence chips to cranes at U.S. ports.The vote comes just over a week since the bill was proposed following one public hearing with little debate, and after action in Congress had stalled for more than a year. Last month, President Joe Biden's re-election campaign joined TikTok, raising hopes among TikTok officials that legislation was unlikely this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

European lawmakers approved the world's most comprehensive legislation yet on AI (non-paywalled link), setting out sweeping rules for developers of AI systems and new restrictions on how the technology can be used. From a report: The European Parliament on Wednesday voted to give final approval to the law after reaching a political agreement last December with European Union member states. The rules, which are set to take effect gradually over several years, ban certain AI uses, introduce new transparency rules and require risk assessments for AI systems that are deemed high-risk. The law comes amid a broader global debate about the future of AI and its potential risks and benefits as the technology is increasingly adopted by companies and consumers. Elon Musk recently sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman for allegedly breaking the company's founding agreement by prioritizing profit over AI's benefits for humanity. Altman has said AI should be developed with great caution and offers immense commercial possibilities. The new legislation applies to AI products in the EU market, regardless of where they were developed. It is backed by fines of up to 7% of a company's worldwide revenue. The AI Act is "the first regulation in the world that is putting a clear path towards a safe and human-centric development of AI," said Brando Benifei, an EU lawmaker from Italy who helped lead negotiations on the law. The law still needs final approval from EU member states, but that process is expected to be a formality since they already gave the legislation their political endorsement. While the law only applies in the EU it is expected to have a global impact because large AI companies are unlikely to want to forgo access to the bloc, which has a population of about 448 million people. Other jurisdictions could also use the new law as a model for their AI regulations, contributing to a wider ripple effect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Swedish music streaming company Spotify is rolling out full-length music videos in a limited beta launch for premium subscribers, venturing into an arena that YouTube has dominated for nearly two decades. From a report: Music videos will be available to premium users in the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya, in beta starting on Wednesday, the company said, as it attempts to grow its user base. While it aims to reach 1 billion users by 2030, Spotify's new plan faces competition from Apple Music and Alphabet's YouTube, which allows users to watch music videos for free.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Rainbow reports via SpaceNews: SpaceX has secured conditional approval to use extremely high-frequency E-band radio waves to improve the capacity of its low Earth orbit Starlink broadband constellation. The Federal Communications Commission said March 8 it is allowing SpaceX to use E-band frequencies between second-generation Starlink satellites and gateways on the ground, alongside already approved spectrum in the Ka and Ku bands. Specifically, SpaceX is now also permitted to communicate between 71 and 76 gigahertz from space to Earth, and 81-86 GHz Earth-to-space, using the up to 7,500 Gen2 satellites SpaceX is allowed to deploy. SpaceX has plans for 30,000 Gen2 satellites, on top of the 4,400 Gen1 satellites already authorized by the FCC. However, the FCC deferred action in December 2022 on whether to allow SpaceX to deploy the other three-quarters of its Gen2 constellation, which includes spacecraft closer to Earth to improve broadband speeds. The regulator also deferred action at the time on SpaceX's plans to use E-band frequencies, citing a need to first establish ground rules for using them in space. In a March 8 regulatory filing, the FCC said it found "SpaceX's proposed operations in the E-band present no new or increased frequency conflicts with other satellite operations." But the order comes with multiple conditions, including potentially forcing SpaceX to modify operations if another satellite operator also seeks to use the radio waves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12P/Pons-Brooks, a Halley-type comet larger than Mount Everest and with a 71.3-year orbit, is expected to become visible to the naked eye in the coming weeks as it makes its closest approach to the sun on April 21. The Guardian reports: While some reports suggest 12P/Pons-Brooks was spotted as far back as the 14th century, it is named after the French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons who discovered it in 1812 and the British-American astronomer William Robert Brooks who observed it on its next orbit in 1883. Thought to have a nucleus about 30km (20 miles) in diameter, it is classed as a cryovolcanic comet, meaning it erupts with dust, gases and ice when pressure builds inside as it is heated. One such outburst last year caused it to brighten a hundredfold and garnered it the sobriquet of "the Devil Comet" after the haze that surrounds it formed a horned shape. While the comet -- and its green tinge -- has already been spotted in the night sky, experts say it is expected to become even brighter in the coming weeks. "The comet is expected to reach a magnitude of 4.5 which means it ought to be visible from a dark location in the UK," said Dr Paul Strom, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick. "The comet moves from the constellation of Andromeda to Pisces. As it does so it passes by bright stars which will make it easier to spot on certain dates. In particular, on March 31 12P/Pons-Brooks will be only 0.5 a degree from the bright star called Hamal," he said. But Dr Robert Massey, the deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, said even if the comet did become brighter it could still be difficult to see, adding that basic instruments such as small telescopes would greatly help. "If you have a half-decent pair of binoculars, certainly attempt to look for it with those," said Massey, adding that apps that map the sky were also useful. The best views of the comet are currently to be found in the northern hemisphere. Massey said those who wanted to catch a glimpse should venture out on a clear evening and look low in the west-north-west as twilight came to an end. "You want to avoid haze, you want to avoid moonlight, you want to avoid light pollution."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees -- those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers and meatpackers in each state. State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a "war on our ranching" and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits. Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane -- a potent greenhouse gas that's roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions. For years, climate activists have been calling for more scrutiny and regulation of emissions from the agricultural sector and for nations to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products due to their climate impacts. Last year, over 150 countries pledged to voluntarily cut emissions from food and agriculture at the United Nations' annual climate summit. But the industry has avoided increased regulation and pushed back against efforts to decrease the consumption of meat, with help from local and state governments across the U.S. Bills in Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Tennessee are just the latest legislation passed in statehouses across the U.S. that have targeted cell-cultured meat, which is produced by taking a sample of an animal's muscle cells and growing them into edible products in a lab. Sixteen states -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming -- have passed laws addressing the use of the word "meat" in such products' packaging, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas, with some prohibiting cell-cultured, plant-based or insect-based food products from being labeled as meat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Google awarded $10 million to 632 researchers from 68 countries in 2023 for finding and responsibly reporting security flaws in the company's products and services. Though this is lower than the $12 million Google's Vulnerability Reward Program paid to researchers in 2022, the amount is still significant, showcasing a high level of community participation in Google's security efforts. The highest reward for a vulnerability report in 2023 was $113,337, while the total tally since the program's launch in 2010 has reached $59 million. For Android, the world's most popular and widely used mobile operating system, the program awarded over $3.4 million. Google also increased the maximum reward amount for critical vulnerabilities concerning Android to $15,000, driving increased community reports. During security conferences like ESCAL8 and hardwea.io, Google awarded $70,000 for 20 critical discoveries in Wear OS and Android Automotive OS and another $116,000 for 50 reports concerning issues in Nest, Fitbit, and Wearables. Google's other big software project, the Chrome browser, was the subject of 359 security bug reports that paid out a total of $2.1 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two top executives from the crypto exchange Binance have been arrested in Nigeria for allegedly destabilizing the national currency. Quartz reports: According to a Wall Street Journal report, Tigran Gambaryan, head of financial-crime compliance at Binance who previously worked at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Nadeem Anjarwalla, a British-Kenyan national and Binance's regional manager for Africa, have been held against their will for the past two weeks in the country. As per reports, Nigerian government officials invited Binance executives to discuss an ongoing dispute about the world's largest crypto exchange allegedly driving down the value of their national currency. Gambaryan and Anjarwalla arrived in Nigeria on February 25th; after their meeting with government officials, both were taken to their hotels. Later, they were instructed to pack their belongings and move to a guesthouse run by Nigeria's National Security Agency, as stated by their families, per reports. The Nigerian government has accused Binance of exacerbating the country's foreign exchange challenges through rate manipulation for profit. The authorities have also accused the crypto exchange of illegal operations and have restricted access to the company's website. There are also reports that Nigeria sought a $10 billion penalty from Binance for processing around $26 billion in untraceable funds in the country. [...] The reason why and how Nigeria's economic crisis is linked with Binance is yet to be found out. Binance is hoping to resolve the matter soon, according to CoinDesk. The report notes that Nigeria is experiencing its worst economic crisis in recent years due to inflation and the devaluation of their currency, the naira.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), the Pentagon has reportedly scrapped its plan to allocate $2.5 billion in grants to Intel, causing the firm's stock to slip in extended-hours trading. From a report: The decision now leaves the U.S. Commerce Department, which is responsible for doling out the funds from the U.S. CHIPs and Science Act, to make up the shortfall, the news outlet said. The Commerce Dept. was initially only supposed to cover $1B of the $3.5B that Intel is slated to receive for advanced defense and intelligence-related semiconductors. The deal is slated to position Intel as the dedicated supplier for processors used for military and intelligence applications and could result in a Secure Enclave inside Intel's chip factory, the news outlet said. With the Pentagon reportedly pulling out, it could alter how much Intel and other companies receive from the CHIPs Act, the news outlet said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Arkady Volozh, the billionaire cofounder of Russia's biggest internet company, was removed from the EU sanctions list today, clearing the way for his return to the world of international tech. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the European Council confirmed to WIRED that the Yandex cofounder was among three people whose sanctions were lifted this week. Volozh, 60, was initially included on the EU sanctions list in June 2023, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. "Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation," the blocsaidlast year to justify its decision. "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation." In response, Volozh stepped down from his position as Yandex CEO, calling the sanctions "misguided." [...] The removal of sanctions affecting one of Russian tech's most prominent figures will be especially significant if Volozh goes on to build Yandex 2.0 inside Europe. The billionaire maintains strong ties to exiled Russian tech talent, with thousands of Yandex staff leaving the country after the start of the war. "These people are now out, and in a position to start something new, continuing to drive technological innovation," Volozh said in the same 2023 statement. "They will be a tremendous asset to the countries in which they land." Yandex is widely known as "Russia's Google" because it monopolizes the Russian search market and offers many other services, including Yandex Music for streaming, Yandex Navigator for maps, and Yandex Go for hailing a ride. "Over the past 18 months, [Dutch-based Yandex NV] has been involved in complex negotiations with the Kremlin, in an attempt to sell its Russian operations while carving out four Europe-based units, which include businesses focused on self-driving cars, cloud computing, data labeling, and education tech," reports Wired. Last month, Yandex NV reached a "binding agreement" to sell its operations in the country for $5.2 billion -- a price that reflects a 50% discount that Moscow imposes on companies from "unfriendly" countries like the Netherlands as a condition of exiting business in Russia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After 10 years and billions of dollars spent in development, Apple abruptly canceled its ambitious car project known as "Titan," shifting its focus and resources on the company's artificial intelligence division. In a recent Q&A on Monday, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled) shared some new insights about the project and how involved the Apple Silicon team was before it was shut down. According to Gurman, Apple was planning to power the "AI brain" of the car with a custom Apple Silicon chip that would have the equivalent power of four M2 Ultra chips (the most powerful Apple has to date) combined. 9to5Mac reports: A single M2 Ultra chip consists of 134 billion transistors and features a 24-core CPU, a GPU with up to 76 cores, and a dedicated 32-core Neural Engine. M2 Ultra powers the current generation of Mac Studio and Mac Pro. Interestingly, Gurman says that the development of this new chip for the car was "nearly finished" before the project was discontinued. As some of the engineers working on the car project were reassigned to other teams at Apple, the company could reuse the engineering of this new chip for future projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Discord will soon allow developers to build new games and apps that can be used directly in its chat app. A selection of minigames and apps have been available to Discord users for months now, but starting March 18th, all Discord developers will get access to a new Embedded App SDK that lets them build these special embedded apps. Discord has used its Activities feature to enable apps like YouTube, promote minigames like poker, and even encourage users to play with a shared whiteboard experience. These apps all appear as an embedded iframe inside Discord, but they've been limited to select developers so far. The SDK will open up this Activities section of Discord to many more developers, so we're bound to see a lot more minigames that can be played directly inside Discord chats. [...] Discord is also experimenting with a way to allow users to add apps to their accounts so they roam across servers. Developers will be able to enable their apps for accounts, and the experiment will launch alongside the app SDK on March 18th. Discord is also bringing back its app pitches, where developers can pitch prototype app ideas and secure up to $30,000 in funding.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The New York Times has denied claims by OpenAI that it "hacked" the company's artificial intelligence systems to create misleading evidence of copyright infringement, calling the accusation as "irrelevant as it is false." The Times in a court filing on Monday said OpenAI was "grandstanding" in its request to dismiss parts of the newspaper's lawsuit alleging its articles were misused for artificial intelligence training. The Times sued OpenAI and its largest financial backer Microsoft in December, accusing them of using millions of its articles without permission to train chatbots to provide information to users. The newspaper is among several prominent copyright owners including authors, visual artists and music publishers that have sued tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work in AI training. The Times' complaint cited several instances in which programs like OpenAI's popular chatbot ChatGPT gave users near-verbatim excerpts of its articles when prompted. OpenAI responded last month that the Times had paid an unnamed "hired gun" to manipulate its products into reproducing the newspaper's content. It asked the court to dismiss parts of the case, including claims that its AI-generated content infringes the Times' copyrights. "In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will," OpenAI said. The company also said it would eventually prove that its AI training made fair use of copyrighted content. The Times replied on Monday that it had simply used the "first few words or sentences" of its articles to prompt ChatGPT to recreate them."OpenAI's true grievance is not about how The Times conducted its investigation, but instead what that investigation exposed: that Defendants built their products by copying The Times's content on an unprecedented scale -- a fact that OpenAI does not, and cannot, dispute," the Times said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is using AI in the operation of its 45,000km (28,000-mile) high-speed rail network, with the technology achieving several milestones, according to engineers involved in the project. From a report: An AI system in Beijing is processing vast amounts of real-time data from across the country and can alert maintenance teams of abnormal situations within 40 minutes, with an accuracy as high as 95 per cent, they said in a peer-reviewed paper. "This helps on-site teams conduct reinspections and repairs as quickly as possible," wrote Niu Daoan, a senior engineer at the China State Railway Group's infrastructure inspection centre, in the paper published by the academic journal China Railway. In the past year, none of China's operational high-speed railway lines received a single warning that required speed reduction due to major track irregularity issues, while the number of minor track faults decreased by 80 per cent compared to the previous year. According to the paper, the amplitude of rail movement caused by strong winds also decreased -- even on massive valley-spanning bridges -- with the application of AI technology. [...] According to the paper, after years of effort Chinese railway scientists and engineers have "solved challenges" in comprehensive risk perception, equipment evaluation, and precise trend predictions in engineering, power supply and telecommunications. The result was "scientific support for achieving proactive safety prevention and precise infrastructure maintenance for high-speed railways," the engineers said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're confused about what makes a PC an "AI PC," you're not alone. But finally have something of an answer: if it packs a GPU, a processor that boasts a neural processing unit and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions, it qualifies -- at least according to Robert Hallock, Intel's senior director of technical marketing. As luck would have it, that combo is present in Intel's current-generation desktop processors -- 14th-gen Core, aka Core Ultra, aka "Meteor Lake." All models feature a GPU, NPU, and can handle Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI) that speed some -- surprise! -- neural networking tasks, and the DP4a instructions that help GPUs to process video. Because AI PCs are therefore just PCs with current processors, Intel doesn't consider "AI PC" to be a brand that denotes conformity with a spec or a particular capability not present in other PCs. Intel used the "Centrino" brand to distinguish Wi-Fi-enabled PCs, and did likewise by giving home entertainment PCs the "Viiv" moniker. Chipzilla still uses the tactic with "vPro" -- a brand that denotes processors that include manageability and security for business users. But AI PCs are neither a brand nor a spec. "The reason we have not created a category for it like Centrino is we believe this is simply what a PC will be like in four or five years time," Hallock told The Register, adding that Intel's recipe for an AI PC doesn't include specific requirements for memory, storage, or I/O speeds. "There are cases where a very large LLM might require 32GB of RAM," he noted. "Everything else will fit comfortably in a 16GB system."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new startup called Cognition AI can turn a user's prompt into a website or video game. From a report: A new installment of Silicon Valley's most exciting game, Are We in a Bubble?!, has begun. This time around the game's premise hinges on whether AI technology is poised to change the world as the consumer internet did -- or even more dramatically -- or peter out and leave us with some advances but not a new global economy. This game isn't easy to play, and the available data points often prove more confusing than enlightening. Take the case of Cognition AI Inc. You almost certainly have not heard of this startup, in part because it's been trying to keep itself secret and in part because it didn't even officially exist as a corporation until two months ago. And yet this very, very young company, whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York, has raised $21 million from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund and other brand-name investors, including former Twitter executive Elad Gil. They're betting on Cognition AI's team and its main invention, which is called Devin. Devin is a software development assistant in the vein of Copilot, which was built by GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, but, like, a next-level software development assistant. Instead of just offering coding suggestions and autocompleting some tasks, Devin can take on and finish an entire software project on its own. To put it to work, you give it a job -- "Create a website that maps all the Italian restaurants in Sydney," say -- and the software performs a search to find the restaurants, gets their addresses and contact information, then builds and publishes a site displaying the information. As it works, Devin shows all the tasks it's performing and finds and fixes bugs on its own as it tests the code being written.The founders of Cognition AI are Scott Wu, its chief executive officer; Steven Hao, the chief technology officer; and Walden Yan, the chief product officer. Hao was most recently one of the top engineers at Scale AI, a richly valued startup that helps train AI systems. Yan, until recently at Harvard University, requested that his status at the school be left ambiguous because he hasn't yet had the talk with his parents.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is restricting AI chatbot Gemini from answering questions about the global elections set to happen this year, the Alphabet-owned firm said on Tuesday, as it looks to avoid potential missteps in the deployment of the technology. From a report: The update comes at a time when advancements in generative AI, including image and video generation, have fanned concerns of misinformation and fake news among the public, prompting governments to regulate the technology. When asked about elections such as the upcoming U.S. presidential match-up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Gemini responds with "I'm still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search".Google had announced restrictions within the U.S. in December, saying they would come into effect ahead of the election. "In preparation for the many elections happening around the world in 2024 and out of an abundance of caution, we are restricting the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses," a company spokesperson said on Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.